Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel (theverge.com)

New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.

Comments

How long?

[freeze128]

The article doesn't say, but does anyone know how long this "first segment" is? Since the TBM itself is 400 feet long, I can only assume it's at least 400 feet...

Re:How long?

[arglebargle_xiv]

So they cut a lousy six and a half feet? Call me when they connect two cities!

I'm selling shares in a venture to connect the cities of Champaign and Urbana if you're interested.

Unique concept!

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk's idea is original and terrific! He is proposing building a network of tunnels to move people around LA. No other cities anywhere will have such things. These subterranean roadways, or subways, will be... oh wait.

To keep the concept fresh, he could sell sandwiches on them as well. They would be Subway Sand... nevermind.

Re: Unique concept!

[Anonymous Coward]

SpaceX has had unprofitable periods and profitable periods. General consensus is that it's probably running around the break even point on average, but it's doing that while plumbing a large amount of R&D money into reusable rocket technologies, developing them and currently trying to drive the refurb window down to days. That may not meet your definition of "profitable", but if nothing else, it's employing a lot of people, helping local economies, advancing the state of the art in aerospace, and has directly driven launch costs down while causing competitors to find ways to make access to space cheaper too. That's already a win, even if they go bust tomorrow, which is unlikely.

There's a similar situation for Tesla, plumbing a huge amount of money into a battery factory and generally investing for the long haul, not for immediate profit.

Unlike many businessmen, Musk is not in it for the money. He's in it to change the world in ways he believe are for the better. Will it all work out? Probably some will, some won't (I'm not sold on the viability of the Boring idea), and there are problems with his approaches (e.g, running employees to the bone) but it's still a damn sight more impressive than "schlub at Starbucks". He's done more for the world than you will do if you had a hundred lifetimes to do it in.

Re:How long has this been secretly planned?

[Gavagai80]

He already used all the tunneling equipment to build his secret underground super-villain lair. This is just re-purposing it for profit.

Re:Pointless explanation

[whoever57]

In the play, the eponymous character "Godot" never arrives.

Re:Purely selfish intentions

[Nethemas the Great]

If this was purely motivated by serving his butt from home to office I'm pretty sure a helicopter would be more economical than boring tunnels up and down Californian metros.

Re:Totally awesome - really

[bobbied]

But he hasn't left his own property yet has he? There isn't a lot of red tape to work though to dig a hole on your own property, some, but not a lot.

It's a tunnel that goes nowhere at this point. Wait, he's going to be tied up in red tape soon enough doing traffic studies, environmental impact statements, building permits and OSHA reports.... Not to mention doing some actual engineering and survey work...

However, I wouldn't be surprised if getting caught up in the red tape isn't the plan. I know of a couple of deep holes being dug in some pretty interesting locations under strange circumstances, including this one. I'm beginning to suspect some kind of Glomar Explorer esk project is going on....This hole in the ground sure looks like a cover story worthy of Howard Huges, dubious in actual value, but plausible enough you cannot just dismiss it out of hand.

Re:How long has this been secretly planned?

[sexconker]

IIRC the machine was built for a tunnel somewhere else and he bought it, but wikipedia does not have it and I am not digging deeper.

If only you had some sort of machine to help you dig deeper.

Re:Pointless explanation

[Swistak]

Dude. Spoilers!